topic PyCharm environment broke access to arcpy... help?! in Python Questions

PyCharm environment broke access to arcpy... help?!

AllenDailey1 — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:12:02 GMT

I seem to have broken arcpy by setting up an "environment" in a certain way in PyCharm. Can anyone help me fix this, without having to uninstall and reinstall ArcGIS Pro? (Reinstalling would mean I'd have to re-do a bunch of other settings on this machine.)

I know this documentation exists about setting up PyCharm for Pro, but I failed to double-check it today. PyCharm Setup for ArcGIS Desktop - Esri Community

Instead of setting up an "existing environment" like the documentation says to, I chose "new environment," with "location" of C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Pro\bin\Python\envs\argispro-py3 - apparently this was bad. For "interpreter," I selected the python.exe from that arcgispro-py3 folder.

Now when I run a script that worked perfectly on a different machine, I get error "No module named 'arcpy'".

When I double-click "C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Pro\bin\Python\envs\arcgispro-py3\python.exe" in File Explorer and then type "import arcpy," I also get the same error.

Any ideas?

Re: PyCharm environment broke access to arcpy... help?!

DanPatterson — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:19:29 GMT

a long shot

Repair an environment—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

you may have to repair the arcgispro install instead (when you go to "uninstall a program" there is a "repair" option which you should try first to see if it will just repair the ...arcgispro-py3 environment

Re: PyCharm environment broke access to arcpy... help?!

AllenDailey1 — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:25:49 GMT

Thank you for sharing this idea!

Re: PyCharm environment broke access to arcpy... help?!

AllenDailey1 — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:30:13 GMT

I think I fixed it!

I was comparing the contents of C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Pro\bin\Python\envs\arcgispro-py3, on the broken machine vs. a machine where arcpy works.

I then noticed two files that were created today on the broken one, but do not exist on the good one. I deleted the files, then ran my script, and I didn't get the error!

The 2 files I deleted were: .gitignore and pyvenv.cfg

I also deleted the PyCharm project I had created earlier.

Re: PyCharm environment broke access to arcpy... help?!

DanPatterson — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 20:42:53 GMT

I marked it as Accepted Solution as a reminder to check for unnecessary package files. Good catch

Re: PyCharm environment broke access to arcpy... help?!

TimWestern — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 20:50:33 GMT

I will echo this as a possibility as I recently ran into a similar issue.

For me it happened after installing Anaconda to help manage different environments, and up till then I was using Git Bash as the terminal of choice. Now I can't seem to do everything with arc py in some environments with it. Locally repairing got me back to good, but I am now seeing that having to activate environments in conda feels like a every time you restart a terminal instance thing, unless you setup a user environment variable, access it from the script to call it somehow, but if python is broken generally, it doesn't seem to help much.